Leigber: Finding my laughter

I've noticed, and I've felt the deficiency, but I didn't realize that its absence was a wound anyone could see – even my children.

The other day my eight-year-old son dropped this grenade on me: "Mom, you never laugh."

The impact of his statement, childlike in its simplicity and sincerity, struck without warning, swift and penetrating, like a sneak attack on a sleeping town. I've been walking around studded with the shrapnel of his words for the past week. Sharing this incident with my friends, I found that so many of them could relate.

What has happened to us?

When did we become such task-masters, unable to spin free of the tethers that tie us to our "to-do" lists and just feel the spontaneous joy of the moment? We know we're supposed to "seize the day" and "smell the roses." We believe in these words, but we can't seem to live them.

Too many of us are drowning in somber, gray-black pools of our own seriousness.

As the kids have grown and life has become more about completing tasks and meeting deadlines, we feel like program managers more than mothers. We have forsaken the joy of the journey, looking only at a mirage up ahead that we delude ourselves into thinking is a finish line. We have become the "Do your homework-practice piano-make your bed-go read a chapter in your book" parents.

This is not the mother I want my kids to remember.

Someday, I want them to call upon the hazy pictures of their childhoods and see me smiling. I want them to think of the mommy of their youth and recollect sunshine and kisses, laughter and silliness, humor and hugs.

So, what can we do about it?

First, we must recognize that joy is not some mysterious, external, tangible thing. We cannot go outside of ourselves to find it. True bliss is not something that waxes and wanes, a fleeting flash that illuminates and then is gone. It is a decision to experience life in a certain way, to see the blossom and not the thorn, to revel in the simple pleasures of every day, and they are there if we allow ourselves to see them.

Like the brilliant amethyst crystals inside the hardened shells of geodes, joy is inside us.

We must excavate through the layers of sediment covering the precious gems, dig ceaselessly until we finally find what has been lost. Then, we can hope that our children will once again hear our transcendent peals of laughter, little purple jewels, glorious and iridescent, flung skyward and floating on the breeze of our vast adoration of them, like tiny love letters to their future selves.

-Alison Leigber is a former Laguna Hills High School English teacher and now a stay-at-home mom who lives with her husband of 17 years and their three boys. She has called Laguna Hills home since 1983.